A Contribution to the Future Tense Debate – A Case Study from Serbian

Aleksandra, M, Radovanović

Српски језик : студије српске и словенске

1

675

691

0354-9259

http://doi.fil.bg.ac.rs/volume.php?pt=journals&issue=sj-2019-24-1&i=38

2019-2020/02/13/11:41:12

Considerable controversy surrounds the future tense, making its theoretical status the object of a long-standing debate. This paper intends to contribute to this line of research by providing evidence from a language widely accepted as having an uncontroversial future tense. It aims to pursue the following questions: whether Serbian has a clear-cut future tense and whether there is linguistic evidence to subsume this grammatical form under mood. To this end, the future tense in Serbian is scrutinised against the backdrop of the arguments presented in the debate on will. The theoretical account is supported by illustrative examples extracted from the contrastive sentential corpus compiled for the purposes of this research. The findings indicate that the Serbian future tense is not beyond dispute and point to the criticality of the conceptual argument. Also, the explanatory framework based on tense as an epistemic category (Lyons 1977) and modality as epistemic deixis (Frawley 1992) suggests that is to be subsumed under mood as the concepts of non-factivity, non-remoteness and irrealis modality clearly indicate its modal semantics.

English, epistemic, modality, mood, Serbian, the future tense